Love Quote by Ruby Wax

Ruby Wax isn’t really selling football here; she’s selling permission to enjoy it without pretending you came by your fandom “the right way.” The setup is deliberately blunt: “I knew nothing,” then a conversion experience delivered not by tactics or tradition but by a highlight reel and a crush. Calling Petit “divine” turns the sport into spectacle and celebrity, shifting the entry point from tribal allegiance to pure, gawking pleasure. It’s comedy built on a confession, the kind that disarms gatekeepers by refusing their vocabulary.

The subtext is sharper than the swoon. Wax is puncturing the idea that sports appreciation has to be earned through expertise, and she does it by leaning into a stereotype (“women will love that show”) so exaggerated it reads as a provocation. She’s not naively reducing women to desire; she’s pointing out how often women are treated as outsiders to the game, then weaponizing that framing to smuggle them in. If you’re going to be patronized, she suggests, you might as well cash the patronizing check and enjoy the view.

Context matters: in an era when football’s media ecosystem was increasingly packaged as entertainment, not just competition, a charismatic player becomes a gateway drug. Wax’s genius is to make the gateway unapologetically bodily and irrational. It’s a sly reminder that male fandom is also emotional and aesthetic - only it gets laundered as “passion” and “knowledge.”